I must buy this and unlock all achievements so that everyone will know that I conquered this game and all it's challenges no less than 10 times in 1997. Because what the hell is middle school? I had a Playstation.

This is a great opportunity for those who missed this the first time around. Final Fantasy VII is a hallmark in video gaming and had a phenomenal influence on video game culture. If you've never played it, and you play it now, you'll probably spot tropes that suddenly make sense.

I've tried starting this game 3 different times and never really cared for it. Is the love for this game purely based on nostalgia (probably the main reason I love FFVIII), or is there something I'm missing?

Nostalgia is part of it, but FF7 is genuinely a good game. Perhaps not the best ever, but it was indeed a cornerstone for RPGs and many games in general. If anything it's a good taste of gaming history.

Other than that, it came at a time when most RPGs were medieval fantasy games. Instead, FF7 brought about a modern world with cars and machine guns to go along with the magic and monsters. Characters came alive and were more relatable. The story and settings were always larger than life, with each turn bringing some form of excitement or a cinematic cutscene (a treat back then). The story was a classic "chase the bad guy", but it worked well enough.

For those on the fence, consider this: while the textures are still the same low-resolution ones from the past, the actual rendered resolution of anything with polygons (characters, backdrops in battle sequences, etc) are crisp with today's displays. It's a lot less muddy, especially for those used to the PS1 version's pixellated blockyness.

Finally, if you do get the game, read this tutorial. Apparently the music in the PC version uses inferior MIDI sequences. Someone took the music from the significantly better OST and made a music pack that replaces the crap MIDI versions. Follow the tutorial to swap them out.

Update: Apparently they pulled the tutorial from the official steam forum. I saved it before it was pulled, so I'll copypasta it below...

At first I was disappointed that they included the crappy MIDI versions of all sounds & tracks in the Steam game version instead of the far superior PS1 tracks. Some awesome users here however posted a solution for this, so I made this thread to help others to find a quick way to improve this.

I really, really recommend to do this because it helps greatly with the immersion and ambience of the game, the gaming experience comes closer to the original quality and it's easy to do. You won't regret this.

I took the following part from the readme of the music pack which was made by DLPB / Daniel Burke:

Problem: PSF and Midi do not entirely represent the original master quality of the OST. Solution: I have creating looping ogg from uncompressed official OST. I did this by hand. The result is music which is even higher quality than the PS1 itself. To make this pack a tradeoff between quality and size, I used Adobe Audition to create a target ogg of 192 kbit/s.

INSTALLATION:Unzip the music files into the ogg_music folder located in the FFVII data folder (e.g.: "Program files/Steam/SteamApps/Common/FINAL FANTASY VII/data/music_ogg") and overwrite the old files. Done.You can restore the old files with a reinstall via Steam or if you backup the old files before you overwrite them.

ADDITIONAL INFO:http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=12787.0I take no credit for the mod itself at all. As I said, it's all thanks to DLPB and his team / friends, who get credited in the readme and on the board entries provided before in detail. This quick tutorial just serves the purpose of spreading awareness about a mod that will vastly improve your gaming experience in this classic and legendary title.

I know that it had been released on the PC shortly after it was released for the Playstation. The PC version got a slight upgrade a couple years back that I remember people getting hyped about. I would imagine that this release is that updated version.

As for how it actually plays on the PC I can't say. I was gonna wait until after my cousin's wedding to play it.

Some are asking about mods in the steam forums, but people are coming up cold. Also, there is "phone-home" DRM installed that may interfere with mods. While this is BASED on the old PC port of FF7, it has been tinkered with behind the scenes to run on modern hardware, and that may be a by-product of it. Not saying mods won't happen, but they may need to be retooled to work, or new ones made.

@Koreish - They ARE in a tight spot, even WITH KHIII on the horizon and junk. They're actually really hurting right now.

There was some dumb thing a ways back where Squeenix stated that they weren't going to do a remake until they could make a game that was more successful than 7, otherwise they were "failures". Which, given their recent history, they've more than branded themselves as fucking failures ANYWAY, and from what we've been seeing as of late, they could REALLY use the capitol. Honestly, I think that's the only reason they even allowed STEAM to do this in the first place.

It's also funny because the director that was working on XIII said that he really wanted to remake VII really badly, instead. The company has -officially- gone on record stating that doing a remake for VII would "cost more resources than they would be able to put towards it at this point and time".

...yeah, if I sound bitter, it's because I am. Square used to MEAN something. Seriously, I have no idea what that fucking company has been on since they released 10, to be honest. But that's a discussion for another time.

Confirmed that the tutorial I linked to above was deleted by Steam moderators due to links to "illegal" downloads. Pah.

But I also found something else. Apparently there is a fully orchestrated version of the soundtrack out there that you can use for an entirely new auditory experience. I haven't looked into it fully yet, but the word-on-the-street-pro-tip is to google for "FF7 OST Remastered Ogg Fix v4".

I'm convinced at this point that a remake will never happen. It's sad but like Hammy said they won't do it unless they think it will be more successful than the original release. It doesn't simply have to be successful but it must be MORE SUCCESSFUL. Given a few things, 1. Interest in JRPGs in North America is not nearly as high as it was in 1997. 2. Lots of big budget games released recently (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil 6, Dead Space 3) were considered failures by the developers despite selling millions of copies. 3. A full remake of FF7 for PS3 is out of the question since PS4 is looming on the horizon and a remake for PS4 would very likely be the most expensive project SquareEnix has attempted since FF13 and possibly their most expensive project ever. 4. All these things and others considered it is simply too risky. The original Final Fantasy was named that because it was Squaresoft's last chance to make a hit game. With that in mind if they try to do a remake of FF7 on the PS4 at this point they better plan to call it Final Fantasy (No For Real This Time) VII.

I mean really, this was shown at E3 in 200FUCKING5. That's EIGHT YEARS AGO NOW.If they ever had the perfect time to do it that time is long gone. We can always dream though.